The Supreme Court has taken up the issue of bottled water.
If the court expands the scope of its inquiry to the pricing of surface water (i.e. water from rivers and canals), and the cost of groundwater (i.e. water pumped from the ground) for all users, it can tackle head on a water scarcity issue that may outweigh the construction of large dams in its import to securing our water future.
The court summoned yesterday the CEOs of all bottled water companies to present data on the price of extracted water and the revenue they have made selling it.
The problem is that groundwater extracted by different users comes from a common underground aquifer.
This rule works great when the resource under consideration isn’t particularly scarce: if there are a handful of people drinking from a tub, letting people drink their fill works pretty well.
As the underlying resource becomes scarcer, one person’s use starts hindering another person’s use in a meaningful way, and it may be time to consider other rules of water ownership.
As the water table drops across large parts of Pakistan, it may be time to turn to some such rules.
This links our rights over groundwater to, typically, the extent of land we own: the more the land owned, the greater the allowance to pump water.
Of course, a water regulatory body already exists, and was present in court on Saturday: the Water and Sanitation Agency (Wasa) informed the court that the current tariff from groundwater allows the bottlers to pay one rupee for 500 litres of water pumped, and that a proposed tariff hike will bring this to one rupee per 133 litres.
Subsidies and riparian rights One of our most wasteful sectors when it comes to water use is agriculture, and this is because farmers face nominal tariffs for their use of surface water.